The Dentist and Other Horrors

I went to the dentist for the first time since I lived in Japan. That’s over three years at this point, for those keeping score at home. Unfortunely, I had the most painful teeth cleaning experience of my life, with an extremely polite, albeit sadistic, Korean woman doing the honors. My screams of terror and pain were punctuated only by her sweet voice repeatedly saying, “Oh, I’m sorry.” I couldn’t see the gleam of delight in her eye, but I know it was there.

On the other hand, I will not have to go in for a root canal, as I had feared, but I will have to return to have three cavities filled. Joy. I had suspected I would need a root canal on a tooth that had been worked on while I was in Japan. The cavity filling was performed without Novocaine, with the Japanese dentist telling me in broken English, “Raise your hand when it hurts.” It has never really felt right since, so I feared the worst. Turns out, this was just my own paranoia, and there is nothing wrong with the tooth. I do have a cavity on the tooth directly above, so it might just be displaced pain, which I remember very well from having “dry sockets” when I had my wisdom teeth removed.

In spite of all of this, it is nice to be able to afford such procedures. For most of my time between Japan and Korea, I could not.

In the last three months, I have also struggled to find a decent place to get my hair cut. My hair is very demanding, and needs to be cut very short to avoid the dreaded Jewfro. This has been a struggle my entire life, even back home. I actually found a great place to cut my hair in Japan, well, at least for the first 10 months. Then, inexplicably, the man who normally cut my hair was absent that day, and he was replaced by a rather mean-spirited woman. She had a nasty attitude the entire time, and when she was appearing to finish up without giving the sides and back of my hair the clipper treatment they so desperately needed, I asked her in my best polite Japanese if she could possibly use them. She was resilient at first that I did not need the clippers. I persisted and basically refused to get up until she gave in. Finally, she relented, bitching the entire time about me and at one point even screaming in my ear that I was acting like a child. Needless to say, I never returned to that place again.

I’ve not had any experience approaching that one yet, but I’ve left the salon both times so far with a feeling of disappointment; not because they didn’t do a good job, they did, but because I knew that within a week, my hair would be back to Jewfro length and I would have to be back in the barber’s chair shortly. Quite frankly, I have neither the time nor inclination to be getting a haircut every 2-3 weeks, so hopefully I’ll figure out a better way to convey to them precisely what I want. And yes, I am due for another sheering momentarily.